Jon Recommends: “Gymnopédie No. 1” by Erik Satie

Like any good piece, life is full of natural pauses.

Naturally, I go through moments where I even have difficulty doing things I love. Mostly comes the feeling that what I do is contrived. Or unseasoned. Or generally unaffecting in every way imaginable. Simple stuff like that.

So naturally I take a lot of pauses.

Whether it be a performance, piece of art, characters on a page, or even an evening meal, sometimes you get this sense that it has all been done before and we’ve all heard it and if you glance back you’ll see a bit of yourself that was ten minutes ago so true now look like a frumpy idiot standing in the corner with a mirror talking to himself about his genius.

Cringeworthy at best.

The first instinct is to pause, take a break — find something real — root yourself in that and go from there.

Of course within 5 minutes you are riding the current of the Milky Way wearing your childhood sneakers and using a stop sign as an oar. The sun is a soccer ball and somehow the smell of ice cream drifts through your nose, but you kind of see a light up ahead and you think maybe that is the point so you paddle on.

A guy vrooms on by in a car powered by the mitigated hours of his life and you see his thoughts being typed out on his company’s letterhead and filed into a briefcase marked “To be remembered” and there is a dull sense that he forgot something, and it lingers in his stomach with the burnt toast and instant coffee and you think “Hey, at least he’s smiling.”

So you try smiling and your teeth shatter and by now you have forgotten about the light and you say you know what, I think I’ll take a break from the break.